ThunderPeel2001

Broken Age - Double Fine Adventure!

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There was one thing that kinda bugged me about the interface and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else felt the same way. When you do the actions that skip cutscenes in other adventure games (double clicking the mouse or simultaneous left-and-right click) the game detects it and tells you to press the spacebar. If they're detecting the action, why not just skip the cutscene and not force me to move my hand on to the keyboard?

 

I also found it strange that there was an option to skip cutscenes but not individual dialogue lines.

 

I liked that a lot.  It was to prevent you from accidentally skipping scenes.  I'm not sure if it's true, but I think spacebar will quick skip without double clicking.  If it was set up the way you say, I'm certain I would have missed a lot of the game or felt afraid to click.  It makes clicking the mouse a completely safe activity, which is important.

 

Also I disagree completely with people saying it's designed for tablets.  While they are going to release on tablets, and I'm sure it came up frequently, I seriously don't feel like the UX was driven by that.  It's just a nice tight modern design.

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I liked that a lot.  It was to prevent you from accidentally skipping scenes.  I'm not sure if it's true, but I think spacebar will quick skip without double clicking.  If it was set up the way you say, I'm certain I would have missed a lot of the game or felt afraid to click.  It makes clicking the mouse a completely safe activity, which is important.

Okay, ignoring the double-click, what about the simultaneous click? Do you ever do that accidentally? These are habits that have been ingrained in me from years of Adventure gaming. It worked fine for all that time, so I'm wondering why DF decided to implement it differently.

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Okay, ignoring the double-click, what about the simultaneous click? Do you ever do that accidentally? These are habits that have been ingrained in me from years of Adventure gaming. It worked fine for all that time, so I'm wondering why DF decided to implement it differently.

no, but I never do that at all. I've played a lot of adventure games and never picked that up. Tbh it feels like an obscure user interaction, it's hard to fault them for missing or abandoning it.

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no, but I never do that at all. I've played a lot of adventure games and never picked that up. Tbh it feels like an obscure user interaction, it's hard to fault them for missing or abandoning it.

They're not abandoning it, though. They've captured the behaviour but instead of implementing the skip they put in a message telling people to use the spacebar instead. It's a strange decision. I wouldn't be as perplexed if nothing happened at all when I simultaneous-clicked.

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I have to say, the idea of being able to seamlessly switch between two characters is a stroke of genius.  If the puzzles ever get hard to the point that you get stuck, you can jump over to the other hero and give your brain some time to think about the other problem subconsciously.

 

Dunno if you've played it, but Gemini Rue does this as well and is really good. If you've got adventure games on the brain after finishing Broken Age I'd recommend checking it out.

 

As far as the weird space bar to skip thing, I just remapped it to right mouse click which eliminated any need to use the keyboard.

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As far as the weird space bar to skip thing, I just remapped it to right mouse click which eliminated any need to use the keyboard.

 

It didn't occur to me to do that until after I finished the game.  Doh!

 

I got through it this evening, a very enjoyable and paced experience.  Though it was really just hitting its stride when the ending hit.  I want part 2!

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As far as the weird space bar to skip thing, I just remapped it to right mouse click which eliminated any need to use the keyboard.

I didn't realise that was possible. Thanks!

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Maybe it's because

I completed Shay's arc in its entirety before really starting Vela's

but does anybody agree that this is Schafer's best story structure and theme/game structure symbiosis to date?

I mean, Vela's ending was just not any twist: it cast a completely different light not only on what I did as Shay, but also on the tiny bits of lore I was exposed to. And it's made even better by the lack of flashback; they respect the player enough to pace the last cinematic in a way that allows enough and mental space to let us come to that realization in parallel. Awesome I'm curious how people who play Vela and Shay in short bursts experienced it.

 

Agreed, it's really nicely structured. I completed the two halves the other way around, and it worked just as well.

Whichever you complete first, it fades to black until you've completed both, then appends the final cutscene.

 

I'm hoping the knife returns since it didn't actually float away into space and is still somewhere inside the ship/Mog Chothra

:tup:

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They're not abandoning it, though. They've captured the behaviour but instead of implementing the skip they put in a message telling people to use the spacebar instead. It's a strange decision. I wouldn't be as perplexed if nothing happened at all when I simultaneous-clicked.

 

You're probably just experiencing the mouse1 click listener rather than the input manager having a specific listener for mouse1 + mouse2 at the same time to do the same thing as mouse1.   I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, but I think it's understandable that certain key bindings from 20 years ago aren't still enough of a convention that people remember to put them in.  You should post in the Double Fine forums and they might add it in before the second half.

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This was good. I was sort of hoping for harder, more complex puzzles, but it's probably good that they toned down the 90s, and the puzzles still felt satisfying and logical. The visuals were fantastic; the lighting, parallax and full-body animation are all the things a modern 2D adventure game should have, and I didn't notice any bugs other than suddenly turning really big when checking the hipster woodcutter's mail box. Hopefully the engine will continue to be used and developed to do even more amazing stuff in the future. The voices were great, and the sound! And the music! The music was fantastic!

 

So when is act 2 out?

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Dunno if you've played it, but Gemini Rue does this as well and is really good. If you've got adventure games on the brain after finishing Broken Age I'd recommend checking it out.

 

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island had this as well.

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The puzzles were definitely too easy.  Easy to a point where you actually had to be careful not to accidentally solve them and thereby deprive yourself the opportunity to see/hear everything.  I remember in the documentary they were talking about it being difficult to escape Shay's routine, and not wanting to frustrate people.  In this version they went the complete opposite direction.  I'm guessing I'm not the only one who accidentally broke out of the routine before even having a chance to run all of the missions through once.

 

Shay's portion also worked a lot better than Vella's.  I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it was because it was a more cohesive world.  It would have been nice if Vella's world was denser and less linear.  Harder puzzles would have also helped.  Not only would you have been forced to slow down and absorb the world, but there would have been strong emotional bonds formed with those aha moments.  As it stands, the game feels flat.  Yes, the graphics are beautiful, the story is wonderful, and the voice acting is top notch, but there's something missing.

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I always cringe a little when people say "the puzzles were too easy", that's how moon logic was born... I'd rather have a fluid and simple adventure that have it ruined a bit by getting stuck, not to mention that since I've been playing adventure games since I was a little kid, the puzzles are easier for me. It's probably also easier for the rest of you for the same reason. :|

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I don't necessarily want "crazy adventure" logic, but I would like to have something a bit more robust than mostly just knowing exactly what the solution was. 

 

Of course, I was playing with my wife and my daughter watching, and any puzzle I didn't get quickly, they would spot in short order.  So maybe not fair to judge puzzle difficulty when 3 people are all contributing. 

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At least for me, I just know what to do because I'm experienced with these kind of games, nowadays if I get stuck in a game, it's because it's demanding a leap of logic or it's a trial and error puzzle I can't be bothered with to do "normally".

 

Imagine if you've spent half your life reading mystery novels, the more you read them, the easier it is for you to figure out the mystery. 

 

The more you play, the easier it gets, it's as simple as that.

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If I play this and find it really hard I'm totally going to feel really dumb. :tup:

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I and my wife got stuck in Shay's routine until we figured out we could

click on the tongue again

. We're bad with timed things. We definitely were getting as bored as he, haha.

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I thought I needed a sequence of actions.

 

I wonder if they toyed at all with having multiple solutions? They could have then tried making them a little more complex, so that players had to work for it a bit but could conceivably make a little progress every time through.

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Anyone ever play The Feeble Files.  Granted, that game had some terrible puzzles, but it also had incredibly good ones.  At one point you're trapped in a prison colony, and stuck in a routine that you have to figure out how to break out of.  Now that was an epic escape.  The difficultly and repetitiveness of the routine only helped to enhance the mood and feeling of being in the prison.  hmmm... I should replay that sometime.

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Finished!

 

Though unfortunately, the weird bugs with switching the characters meant that I couldn't get to the ending cutscene. So I played through both of the stories separately, then found a youtube'd ending that didn't have some insane git talking over it. What a shocker! Nice twist, absolutely didn't see that one coming. In fact I assumed that the old, cryogenically frozen future man was Shay. Wronggg!

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Finished!

 

Though unfortunately, the weird bugs with switching the characters meant that I couldn't get to the ending cutscene. So I played through both of the stories separately, then found a youtube'd ending that didn't have some insane git talking over it. What a shocker! Nice twist, absolutely didn't see that one coming. In fact I assumed that the old, cryogenically frozen future man was Shay. Wronggg!

I thought that too! Unless there's some previously unintroduced time travel shenanigans, I suspect there's some Moon-like clone worker shenanigans going on.

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It's nice to see, in retrospect, the visual cues in the spaceship foreshadowing the twist. Marek's screens, the four grabbing pods and the minigame all link up directly to Mog Chothra.

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I thought the same, and then figured it was just a clever red herring so you didn't connect the cute space animals to Mog Chothra eating maidens. Once I got to the ending, I suddenly realised the significance of grabbing game.

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I'm curious if there are stats about who played which part first. I went with Vella, and I think that's both consciously because I was attracted to the landscape and the mysterious sleeping baker girl, and subconsciously because her story was on the left side of the screen, and in the West, that's where you begin. Additionally, since time moves chronologically, I think there's an inherent urge to start in the [perceived] pastoral past before tackling the sci-fi future story.

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